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MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 


MILTON'S 
TERCENTENARY 

An  address  delivered  before  the  Modern 

Language  Club  of  Yale  University 

on  Milton's  Three   Hundredth 

Birthday. 


By 
HENRY  A.  BEERS 


NEW  HAVEN 

YALE  UKIVERSITY  PRESS 

1910 


MILTON'S    TERCENTENARY 

IT  is  right  that  this  anniversary 
should  be  kept  in  all  English- 
speaking  lands.  Milton  is  as  far 
away  from  us  in  time  as  Dante  was 
from  him;  destructive  criticism  has 
been  busy  with  his  great  poem ;  for- 
midable rivals  of  his  fame  have 
arisen — Dryden  and  Pope,  Words- 
worth and  Byron,  Tennyson  and 
Browning,  not  to  speak  of  lesser 
names — poets  whom  we  read  perhaps 
oftener  and  with  more  pleasure. 
Yet  still  his  throne  remains  unshaken. 
By  general — by  well-nigh  universal — 
consent,  he  is  still  the  second  poet  of 
our  race,  the  greatest,  save  one,  of 
all  who  have  used  the  English  speech. 
The  high  epics,  the  Iliad,  the 
Divine  Comedy,  do  not  appear  to  us 
as  they  appeared  to  their  contempo- 


219089 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

raries,  nor  as  they  appeared  to  the 
Middle  Ages  or  to  the  men  of  the 
Renaissance  or  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  These  peaks  of  song  we 
see  foreshortened  or  in  changed  per- 
spective or  from  a  different  angle  of 
observation.  Their  parallax  varies 
from  age  to  age,  yet  their  stature 
does  not  dwindle ;  they  tower  forever, 
"like  Teneriffe  or  Atlas  unremoved. ' ' 
Paradise  Lost  does  not  mean  the 
same  thing  to  us  that  it  meant  to 
Addison  or  Johnson  or  Macaulay, 
and  much  that  those  critics  said  of  it 
now  seems  mistaken.  Works  of  art, 
as  of  nature,  have  perishable  ele- 
ments, and  suffer  a  loss  from  time's 
transhifting.  Homer's  gods  are 
childish,  Dante's  hell  grotesque ;  and 
the  mythology  of  the  one  and  the 
scholasticism  of  the  other  are  scarcely 
more  obsolete  to-day  than  Milton's 
theology.  Yet  in  the  dryest  parts 
of  Paradise  Lost  we  feel  the  touch 

[2] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

of  the  master.  Two  things  in  par- 
ticular, the  rhythm  and  the  style, 
go  on  victoriously  as  by  their  own 
momentum.  God  the  Father  may 
be  a  school  divine  and  Adam  a  mem- 
ber of  Parliament,  but  the  verse 
never  flags,  the  diction  never  fails. 
The  poem  may  grow  heavy,  but  not 
languid,  thin  or  weak.  I  confess 
that  there  are  traits  of  Milton  which 
repel  or  irritate;  that  there  are 
poets  with  whom  sympathy  is  easier. 
And  if  I  were  speaking  merely  as  an 
impressionist,  I  might  prefer  them 
to  him.  But  this  does  not  affect  my 
estimate  of  his  absolute  greatness. 

All  poets,  then,  and  lovers  of 
poetry,  all  literary  critics  and  stu- 
dents of  language  must  honor  in 
Milton  the  almost  faultless  artist, 
the  supreme  master  of  his  craft.  But 
there  is  a  reason  why,  not  alone  the 
literary  class,  but  all  men  of  English 
stock  should  celebrate  Milton's  ter- 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

centenary.  There  have  been  poets 
whose  technique  was  exquisite,  but 
whose  character  was  contemptible. 
John  Milton  was  not  simply  a  great 
poet,  but  a  great  man,  a  heroic  soul ; 
and  his  type  was  characteristically 
English,  both  in  its  virtues  and  its 
shortcomings.  Of  Shakspere,  the 
man,  we  know  next  to  nothing.  But 
of  Milton  personally  we  know  all 
that  we  need  to  know,  more  than  is 
known  of  many  a  modern  author. 
There  is  abundance  of  biography  and 
autobiography.  Milton  had  a  noble 
self-esteem,  and  he  was  engaged  for 
twenty  years  in  hot  controversies. 
Hence  those  passages  of  apologetics 
scattered  through  his  prose  works, 
from  which  the  lives  of  their  author 
have  been  largely  compiled.  More- 
over he  was  a  pamphleteer  and 
journalist,  as  well  as  a  poet,  uttering 
himself  freely  on  the  questions  of  the 
day.  We  know  his  opinions  on 

[4] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

government,  education,  religion, 
marriage  and  divorce,  the  freedom 
of  the  press  and  many  other  subjects. 
We  know  what  he  thought  of 
eminent  contemporaries,  Charles  I., 
Cromwell,  Vane,  Desborough,  Over- 
ton,  Fairfax.  It  was  not  then  the 
fashion  to  write  critical  essays,  liter- 
ary reviews  and  book  notices.  Yet, 
aside  from  his  own  practice,  his 
writings  are  sown  here  and  there 
with  incidental  judgments  of  books 
and  authors,  from  which  his  literary 
principles  may  be  gathered.  He  has 
spoken  now  and  again  of  Shakspere 
and  Ben  Jonson,  of  Spenser,  Chaucer, 
Euripides,  Homer,  the  book  of  Job, 
the  psalms  of  David,  the  Song  of 
Solomon,  the  poems  of  Tasso  and 
Ariosto,  the  Arthur  and  Charlemagne 
romances,  of  Bacon  and  Selden,  the 
dramatic  unities,  blank  verse  vs. 
rhyme,  and  similar  topics. 

In   some  aspects   and    relations, 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

harsh  and  unlovely,  egotistical  and 
stubborn,  the  total  impression  of 
Milton's  personality  is  singularly  im- 
posing. His  virtues  were  manly 
virtues.  Of  the  four  cardinal  moral 
virtues — the  so-called  Aristotelian 
virtues — temperance,  justice,  forti- 
tude, prudence;  which  Dante  sym- 
bolizes by  the  group  of  stars— 

Non  viste  mai  fuor  ch'  alia  prima  gente — 

Milton  had  a  full  share.  He  was  not 
always,  though  he  was  most  com- 
monly, just.  Prudence,  the  only  vir- 
tue, says  Carlyle,  which  gets  its 
reward  on  earth,  prudence  he  had, 
yet  not  a  timid  prudence.  Of  tem- 
perance— the  Puritan  virtue — and  all 
that  it  includes,  chastity,  self-rever- 
ence, self-control,  Comus  is  the  beau- 
tiful hymn.  But,  above  all,  Milton 
had  the  heroic  virtue,  fortitude ;  not 
only  passively  in  the  proud  and  sub- 
lime endurance  of  the  evil  days  and 
[6] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

evil  tongues  on  which  he  had  fallen ; 
of  the  darkness,  dangers,  solitude 
that  compassed  him  round;  but 
actively  in  "the  unconquerable  will 
#  #  #  and  courage  never  to  sub- 
mit or  yield";  the  courage  which 
"bates  no  jot  of  heart  or  hope,  but 
still  bears  up  and  steers  right  on- 
ward. ' ' 

There  is  nothing  more  bracing  in 
English  poetry  than  those  passages 
in  the  sonnets,  in  Paradise  Lost  and 
in  Samson  Agonistes  where  Milton 
speaks  of  his  blindness.  Yet  here  it 
is  observable  that  Milton,  who  is 
never  sentimental,  is  also  never 
pathetic  but  when  he  speaks  of  him- 
self, in  such  lines,  e.g.,  as  Samson's 

My  race  of  glory  run,  and  race  of  shame, 
And  I  shall  shortly  be  with  them  that  rest. ' ' 

Dante  has  this  same  touching  dignity 
in  alluding  to  his  own  sorrows;  but 
his  hard  and  rare  pity  is  more  often 

[7] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

aroused  by  the  sorrows  of  others :  by 
Ugolino's  little  starving  children,  or 
by  the  doom  of  Francesca  and  her 
lover.  Milton  is  untender.  Yet  vir- 
tue with  him  is  not  always  forbid- 
ding and  austere.  As  he  was  a  poet, 
he  felt  the  "beauty  of  holiness," 
though  in  another  sense  than  Arch- 
bishop Laud's  use  of  that  famous 
phrase.  It  was  his  "natural  haughti- 
ness," he  tells  us,  that  saved  him 
from  sensuality  and  base  descents  of 
mind.  His  virtue  was  a  kind  of 
good  taste,  a  delicacy  almost  wo- 
manly. It  is  the  "Lady  of  Christ's" 
speaking  with  the  lips  of  the  lady  in 
Comus,  who  says 

— That  which  is  not  good  is  not  delicious 
To  a  well  governed  and  wise  appetite." 

But  there  is  a  special  fitness  in 
this  commemoration  at  this  place. 
For  Milton  is  the  scholar  poet.  He 
is  the  most  learned,  the  most  clas- 

[8] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

sical,  the  most  bookish — I  was  about 
to  say  the  most  academic — of  English 
poets;  but  I  remember  that  aca- 
demic, through  its  use  in  certain  con- 
nections, might  imply  a  timid  con- 
formity to  rules  and  models,  a  lack 
of  vital  originality  which  would  not 
be  true  of  Milton.  Still,  Milton  was 
an  academic  man  in  a  broad  sense  of 
the  word.  A  hard  student  of  books, 
he  injured  his  eyes  in  boyhood  by 
too  close  application,  working  every 
day  till  midnight.  He  spent  seven 
years  at  his  university.  He  was  a 
teacher  and  a  writer  on  education.  I 
need  not  give  the  catalog  of  his 
acquirements  further  than  to  say  that 
he  was  the  best  educated  English- 
man of  his  generation. 

Mark  Pattison,  indeed,  who  speaks 
for  Oxford,  denies  that  Milton  was  a 
regularly  learned  man,  like  Usher  or 
Selden.  That  is,  I  understand,  he 
had  made  no  exhaustive  studies  in 
[9] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

professional  fields  of  knowledge  such 
as  patristic  theology  or  legal  antiqui- 
ties. Of  course  not:  Milton  was  a 
poet:  he  was  studying  for  power, 
for  self- culture  and  inspiration,  and 
had  little  regard  for  a  merely  retro- 
spective scholarship  which  would  not 
aid  him  in  the  work  of  creation. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  all  Milton's 
writings  in  prose  and  verse  are  so 
saturated  with  learning  as  greatly  to 
limit  the  range  of  their  appeal.  A 
poem  like  Lycidas,  loaded  with  allu- 
sions, can  be  fully  enjoyed  only  by 
the  classical  scholar  who  is  in  the 
tradition  of  the  Greek  pastoralists, 
who  "knows  the  Dorian  water's 
gush  divine. ' '  I  have  heard  women 
and  young  people  and  unlettered 
readers  who  have  a  natural  taste  for 
poetry,  and  enjoy  Burns  and  Long- 
fellow, object  to  this  classical  stiffness 
in  Milton  as  pedantry.  Now  pedantry 
is  an  ostentation  of  learning  for  its 

[10] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

own  sake,  and  none  has  said  harder 
things  of  it  than  Milton. 

— Who  reads 

Incessantly,  and  to  his  reading  brings  not 
A  spirit  and  judgment  equal  or  superior    *    * 
Uncertain  and  unsettled  still  remains, 
Deep-versed  in  books  and  shallow  in  himself. ' ' 

Cowley  was  the  true  pedant:  his 
erudition  was  crabbed  and  encum- 
bered the  free  movement  of  his  mind, 
while  Milton  made  his  the  grace  and 
ornament  of  his  verse. 

How  charming  is  divine  philosophy ! 

Not  harsh  and  crabbed,  as  dull  fools  suppose, 

But  musical  as  is  Apollo's  lute." 

I  think  we  may  attribute  Milton's 
apparent  pedantry,  not  to  a  wish  for 
display,  but  to  an  imagination  famil- 
iarized with  a  somewhat  special 
range  of  associations.  This  is  a  note 
of  the  Renaissance,  and  Milton's 
culture  was  Renaissance  culture. 
That  his  mind  derived  its  impetus 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

more  directly  from  books  than  from 
life ;  that  his  pages  swarm  with  the 
figures  of  mythology  and  the  imagery 
of  the  ancient  poets  is  true.  In  his 
youthful  poems  he  accepted  and  per- 
fected Elizabethan,  that  is,  Renais- 
sance, forms :  the  court  masque,  the 
Italian  sonnet,  the  artificial  pastoral. 
But  as  he  advanced  in  art  and  life, 
he  became  classical  in  a  severer  sense, 
discarding  the  Italianate  conceits  of 
his  early  verse,  rejecting  rhyme  and 
romance,  replacing  decoration  with 
construction ;  and  finally,  in  his  epic 
and  tragedy  modeled  on  the  pure 
antique,  applying  Hellenic  form  to 
Hebraic  material.  His  political  and 
social,  no  less  than  his  literary,  ideals 
were  classical.  The  English  church 
ritual,  with  its  Catholic  ceremonies ; 
the  universities,  with  their  scholastic 
curricula;  the  feudal  monarchy,  the 
medieval  court  and  peerage — of  all 
these  barbarous  survivals  of  the  Mid- 

[12] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

die  Ages  he  would  have  made  a 
clean  sweep,  to  set  up  in  their  stead 
a  commonwealth  modeled  on  the 
democracies  of  Greece  and  Rome, 
schools  of  philosophy  like  the  Acad- 
emy and  the  Porch,  and  voluntary 
congregations  of  Protestant  worship- 
ers without  priest,  liturgy  or  sym- 
bol, practicing  a  purely  rational  and 
spiritual  religion.  He  says  to  the 
Parliament:  "How  much  better  I 
find  ye  esteem  it  to  imitate  the  old 
and  elegant  humanity  of  Greece  than 
the  barbaric  pride  of  a  Hunnish  and 
Norwegian  stateliness. ' '  And  else- 
where :  '  'Those  ages  to  whose  polite 
wisdom  and  letters  we  owe  that  we 
are  not  yet  Goths  and  Jutlanders. ' ' 
So  in  his  treatment  of  public 
questions  Milton  had  what  Bacon 
calls  "the  humor  of  a  scholar."  He 
was  an  idealist  and  a  doctrinaire, 
with  little  historic  sense  and  small 
notion  of  what  is  practicable  here  and 

[13] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

now.  England  is  still  a  monarchy ; 
the  English  church  is  still  prelatical 
and  has  its  hireling  clergy;  Parlia- 
ment keeps  its  two  chambers,  and  the 
bishops  sit  and  vote  in  the  house  of 
peers;  ritualism  and  tractarianism 
gain  apace  upon  low  church  and 
evangelical;  the  Areopagitica  had  no 
effect  whatever  in  hastening  the 
freedom  of  the  press ;  and,  ironically 
enough,  Milton  himself,  under  the 
protectorate,  became  an  official  book 
licenser. 

England  was  not  ripe  for  a  repub- 
lic ;  she  was  returning  to  her  idols, 
"choosing  herself  a  captain  back  to 
Egypt."  It  took  a  century  and  a 
half  for  English  liberty  to  recover 
the  ground  lost  at  the  Restoration. 
Nevertheless  that  little  group  of  re- 
publican idealists,  Vane,  Bradshaw, 
Lambert  and  the  rest,  with  Milton 
their  literary  spokesman,  must  always 
interest  us  as  Americans  and  repub- 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

licans.  Let  us,  however,  not  mis- 
take. Milton  was  no  democrat.  / 
His  political  principles  were  repub- 
lican, or  democratic  if  you  please, 
but  his  personal  feelings  were  in- 
tensely aristocratic.  Even  that  free 
commonwealth  which  he  thought  he 
saw  so  easy  and  ready  a  way  to  es- 
tablish, and  the  constitution  of  which 
he  sketched  on  the  eve  of  the  Resto- 
ration, was  no  democracy,  but  an 
aristocratic,  senatorial  republic  like 
Venice,  a  government  of  the  opti- 
mates,  not  of  the  populace.  For  the 
trappings  of  royalty,  the  pomp  and 
pageantry,  the  servility  and  flunkey- 
ism  of  a  court,  Milton  had  the  con- 
tempt of  a  plain  republican : 

How  poor  their  outworn  coronets 
Beside  one  leaf  of  that  plain  civic  wreath !" 

But  for  the  people,   as  a  whole,  he  ^ 
had    an     almost     equal     contempt. 
They   were    "the   ungrateful  multi- 

[15] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

tude,"  "the  inconsiderate  multi- 
tude," the  profanum  vulgus,  "the 
throng  and  noises  of  vulgar  and  irra- 
tional men. ' '  There  was  not  a  popu- 
lar drop  of  blood  in  him.  He  had  no 
faith  in  universal  suffrage  or  majority 
rule.  "More  just  it  is,"  he  wrote, 
6  'that  a  less  number  compel  a  greater 
to  retain  their  liberty,  than  that  a 
greater  number  compel  a  less  to  be 
their  fellow  slaves,"  i.e.  to  bring 
back  the  king  by  a  plebescite.  And 
again:  "The  best  affected  and  best 
principled  of  the  people  stood  not 
numbering  or  computing  on  which 
side  were  most  voices  in  Parliament, 
but  on  which  side  appeared  to  them 
most  reason. ' ' 

Milton  was  a  Puritan;  and  the 
Puritans,  though  socially  belonging, 
for  the  most  part,  among  the  plain 
people,  and  though  made  by  acci- 
dent the  champions  of  popular  rights 
against  privilege,  were  yet  a  kind  of 
[16] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

spiritual  aristocrats.  Calvinistic  doc- 
trine made  of  the  elect  a  chosen  few, 
a  congregation  of  saints,  set  apart 
from  the  world.  To  this  feeling  of 
religious  exclusiveness  Milton's  pride 
of  intellect  added  a  personal  inten- 
sity. He  respects  distinction  and  is 
always  rather  scornful  of  the  average 
man,  the  pecus  ignavum  silentum, 
the  herd  of  the  obscure  and  unfamed. 

"Nor  do  I  name  of  men  the  common  rout 
That,  wandering  loose  about, 
Grow  up  and  perish  like  the  summer  fly, 
Heads  without  names,  no  more  remembered. " 

Hazlitt  insisted  that  Shakspere's 
principles  were  aristocratic,  chiefly,  I 
believe,  because  of  his  handling  of 
the  tribunes  and  the  plebs  in 
Coriolanus.  Shakspere  does  treat 
his  mobs  with  a  kindly  and  amused 
contempt.  They  are  fickle,  ignorant, 
illogical,  thick-headed,  easily  im- 
posed upon.  Still  he  makes  you  feel 
that  they  are  composed  of  good  fel- 
[17] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

lows  at  bottofn,  quickly  placated  and 
disposed  to  do  the  fair  thing.  I  think 
that  Shakspere's  is  the  more  demo- 
cratic nature ;  that  his  distrust  of  the 
people  is  much  less  radical  than  Mil- 
ton's. Walt  Whitman's  obstreper- 
ous democracy,  his  all-embracing 
camaraderie,  his  liking  for  the  warm, 
gregarious  pressure  of  the  crowd, 
was  a  spirit  quite  alien  from  his 
whose  "soul  was  like  a  star  and 
dwelt  apart."  Anything  vulgar  was 
outside  or  below  the  sympathies  of 
this  Puritan  gentleman.  Falstaff 
must  have  been  merely  disgusting  to 
him;  and  fancy  him  reading  Mark 
Twain!  In  Milton's  references  to 
popular  pastimes  there  is  always  a 
mixture  of  disapproval,  the  air  of  the 
superior  person.  "The  people  on 
their  holidays,"  says  Samson,  are 
"impetuous,  insolent,  unquencha- 
ble. "  "  Methought, ' '  says  the  lady 
in  Comus, 

[18] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

" — it  was  the  sound 
Of  riot  and  ill  managed  merriment, 
Such  as  the  jocund  flute  or  gamesome  pipe 
Stirs  up  among  the  loose,  unlettered  hinds 
When,  for  their  teeming  flocks  and  granges  full, 
In  wanton  dance  they  praise  the  bounteous  Pan 
And  thank  the  gods  amiss." 

Milton  liked  to  be  in  the  minority, 
to  bear  up  against  the  pressure  of 
hostile  opinion.  "God  intended  to 
prove  me,"  he  wrote,  "whether  I 
durst  take  up  alone  a  rightful  cause 
against  a  world  of  disesteem,  and 
found  I  durst. ' '  The  seraph  Abdiel 
is  a  piece  of  self- portraiture ;  there  is 
no  more  characteristic  passage  in  all 
his  works : 

" — The  Seraph  Abdiel,   faithful  found 
Among  the  faithless,  faithful  only  he    *    *    * 
Nor  number  nor  example  with  him  wrought 
To  swerve  from  truth  or  change  his  constant 

mind, 
Though  single.      From  amidst  them  forth  he 

past 
Long   way    through    hostile    scorn  which  he 

sustained 

[19] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

Superior,  nor  of  violence  feared  aught ; 
And  with  retorted  scorn  his  back  he  turned 
On  those  proud  towers   to  swift  destruction 
doomed." 

Milton  was  na  democrat ;  equality 
and  fraternity  were  not  his  trade, 
though  liberty  was  his  passion.  Lib- 
erty he  defended  against  the  tyranny 
of  the  mob,  as  of  the  king.  He  pre- 
ferred a  republic  to  a  monarchy, 
since  he  thought  it  less  likely  to 
interfere  with  the  independence  of 
the  private  citizen.  Political  liberty, 
liberty  of  worship  and  belief,  freedom 
of  the  press,  freedom  of  divorce,  he 
asserted  them  all  in  turn  with  unsur- 
passed eloquence.  He  proposed  a 
scheme  of  education  reformed  from 
the  clogs  of  precedent  and  authority. 
Even  his  choice  of  blank  verse  for 
Paradise  Lost  he  vindicated  as  a  case 
'  of  "ancient  liberty  recovered  to 
heroic  song  from  this  troublesome 
and  modern  bondage  of  riming. ' ' 

[20] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

There  is  yet  one  reason  more  why 
we  at  Yale  should  keep  this  anniver- 
sary. Milton  was  the  poet  of  Eng- 
lish Puritanism,  and  therefore  he  is 
our  poet.  This  colony  and  this  col- 
lege were  founded  by  English  Puri- 
tans; and  here  the  special  faith  and 
manners  of  the  Puritans  survived 
later  than  at  the  other  great  Univer- 
sity of  New  England — survived  al- 
most in  their  integrity  down  to  a 
time  within  the  memory  of  living 
men.  When  Milton  left  Cambridge 
in  1632,  "church-outed  by  the  prel- 
ates," it  was  among  the  possibili- 
ties that,  instead  of  settling  down  at 
his  father's  country-house  at  Horton, 
he  might  have  come  to  New  Eng- 
land. Winthrop  had  sailed,  with  his 
company,  two  years  before.  In  1635 
three  thousand  Puritans  emigrated 
to  Massachusetts,  among  them  Sir 
Henry  Vane,  the  younger, — the 
"Vane,  young  in  years,  but  in  sage 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

counsels  old,"  of  Milton's  sonnet— 
who  was  made  governor  of  the  colony 
in  the  following  year.  Or  in  1638, 
the  year  of  the  settlement  of  New 
Haven,  when  Milton  went  to  Italy 
for  culture,  it  would  not  have  been 
miraculous  had  he  come  instead  to 
America  for  freedom.  It  was  in  that 
same  year  that,  according  to  a  story 
long  believed  though  now  discredited, 
Cromwell,  Pym,  Hampden  and 
Hazelrig,  despairing  of  any  improve- 
ment in  conditions  at  home,  were 
about  to  embark  for  New  England 
when  they  were  stopped  by  orders 
in  council.  Is  it  too  wild  a  dream 
that  Paradise  Lost  might  have  been 
written  in  Boston  or  in  New  Haven? 
But  it  was  not  upon  the  cards.  The 
literary  class  does  not  willingly  emi- 
grate to  raw  lands,  or  separate  itself 
from  the  thick  and  ripe  environment 
of  an  old  civilization.  However,  we 
know  that  Vane  and  Roger  Williams 

[22] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

were  friends  of  Milton ;  and  he  must 
have  known  and  been  known  to 
Cromwell's  chaplain,  Hugh  Peters, 
who  had  been  in  New  England ;  and 
doubtless  to  others  among  the  colon- 
ists. It  is,  at  first  sight,  therefore 
rather  strange  that  there  is  no  men- 
tion of  Milton,  so  far  as  I  have  ob- 
served, in  any  of  our  earlier  colonial 
writers.  It  is  said,  I  know  not  on 
what  authority,  that  there  was  not  a 
single  copy  of  Shakspere's  plays  in 
New  England  in  the  seventeenth 
century.  That  is  not  so  strange, 
considering  the  Puritan  horror  of  the 
stage.  But  one  might  have  expect- 
ed to  meet  with  mention  of  Milton, 
as  a  controversialist  if  not  as  a  poet. 
The  French  Huguenot  poet  DuBar- 
tas,  whose  poem  La  Semaine  contrib- 
uted some  items  to  the  account  of 
the  creation  in  Paradise  Lost,  was  a 
favorite  author  in  New  England — I 
take  it,  in  Sylvester's  translation, 

[23] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

The  Divine  Weeks  and  Works.  It  is 
also  said  that  the  Emblems  of  Milton's 
contemporary,  Francis  Quarles,  were 
much  read  in  New  England.  But 
Tyler  supposes  that  Nathaniel  Ames, 
in  his  Almanac  for  1725,  "pro- 
nounced there  for  the  first  time  the 
name  of  Milton,  together  with  chosen 
passages  from  his  poems. ' '  And  he 
thinks  it  worth  noting  that  Lewis 
Morris,  of  Morrisania,  ordered  an 
edition  of  Milton  from  a  London 
bookseller  in  1739^ 

The  failure  of  our  forefathers  to 
recognize  the  great  poet  of  their 
cause  may  be  explained  partly  by 
the  slowness  of  the  growth  of 
Milton's  fame  in  England.  His 


*Mr.  Charles  Francis  Adams  informs  me  that  a 
letter  of  inquiry  sent  by  him  to  the  Evening  Post 
has  brought  out  three  or  four  references  to  Milton  in 
the  Magnolia,  besides  other  allusions  to  him  in  the 
publications  of  the  period.  Mr.  Adams  adds,  how- 
ever, that  there  is  nothing  to  show  that  Paradise 
Lost  was  much  read  in  New  England  prior  to  1750. 
The  Magnolia  was  published  in  1702. 

[24] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

minor  poems,  issued  in  1645,  did  not 
reach  a  second  edition  till  1673. 
Paradise  Lost,  printed  in  1667, 
found  its  fit  audience,  though  few, 
almost  immediately.  But  the  latest 
literature  traveled  slowly  in  those 
days  into  a  remote  and  rude  prov- 
ince. Moreover  the  educated  class 
in  New  England,  the  ministers, 
though  a  learned,  were  not  a  literary 
set,  as  is  abundantly  shown  by  their 
own  experiments  in  verse.  It  is  not 
unlikely  that  Cotton  Mather  or 
Michael  Wigglesworth  would  have 
thought  DuBartas  and  Quarles  bet- 
ter poets  than  Milton  if  they  had 
read  the  latter 's  works. 

We  are  proud  of  being  the 
descendants  of  the  Puritans ;  perhaps 
we  are  glad  that  we  are  their 
descendants  only,  and  not  their  con- 
temporaries. Which  side  would  you 
have  been  on,  if  you  had  lived  during 
the  English  civil  war  of  the  seven- 

[25] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

teenth  century?  Doubtless  it  would 
have  depended  largely  on  whether 
you  lived  in  Middlesex  or  in  Devon, 
whether  your  parents  were  gentry  or 
tradespeople,  and  on  similar  acci- 
dents. We  think  that  we  choose, 
but  really  choices  are  made  for  us. 
We  inherit  our  politics  and  our  reli- 
gion. But  if  free  to  choose,  I  know 
in  which  camp  I  would  have  been, 
and  it  would  not  have  been  that  in 
which  Milton's  friends  were  found. 
The  New  Model  army  had  the  disci- 
pline— and  the  prayer  meetings.  I 
am  afraid  that  Rupert's  troopers  plun- 
dered, gambled,  drank  and  swore 
most  shockingly.  There  was  good 
fighting  on  both  sides,  but  the  New 
Model  had  the  right  end  of  the  quar- 
rel and  had  the  victory,  and  I  am 
glad  that  it  was  so.  Still  there  was 
more  fun  in  the  king's  army,  and  it 
was  there  that  most  of  the  good  fel- 
lows were. 

[26] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

The  influence  of  Milton's  religion 
upon  his  art  has  been  much  discussed. 
It  was  owing  to  his  Puritanism  that 
he  was  the  kind  of  poet  that  he  was, 
but  it  was  in  spite  of  his  Puritanism 
that  he  was  a  poet  at  all.  He  was 
the  poet  of  a  cause,  a  party,  a  sect 
whose  attitude  toward  the  graces  of 
life  and  the  beautiful  arts  was  noto- 
riously one  of  distrust  and  hostility. 
He  was  the  poet,  not  only  of  that 
Puritanism  which  is  a  permanent 
element  in  English  character,  but  of 
much  that  was  merely  temporary 
and  local.  How  sensitive  then  must 
his  mind  have  been  to  all  forms  of 
loveliness,  how  powerful  the  creative 
instinct  in  him,  when  his  genius 
emerged  without  a  scar  from  the 
long  struggle  of  twenty  years,  during 
which  he  had  written  pamphlet  after 
pamphlet  on  the  angry  questions  of 
the  day,  and  nothing  at  all  in  verse 
but  a  handful  of  sonnets  mostly  pro- 
voked by  public  occasions ! 
[27] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

/  The  fact  is,  there  were  all  kinds 
of  Puritans.  There  were  dismal  pre- 
cisians, like  William  Prynne,  illiberal 
and  vulgar  fanatics,  the  Tribulation 
Wholesomes,  Hope-on- high  Bombys, 
and  Zeal-of-the-land  Busys,  whose 
absurdities  were  the  stock  in  trade  of 
contemporary  satirists  from  Jonson 
to  Butler.  But  there  were  also  gen- 
tlemen and  scholars,  like  Fairfax, 
Marvell,  Colonel  Hutchinson,  Vane, 
whose  Puritanism  was  consistent 
with  all  elegant  tastes  and  accom- 
plishments. Was  Milton's  Puritan- 
ism hurtful  to  his  art?  No  and  yes. 
It  was  in  many  ways  an  inspiration ; 
it  gave  him  zeal,  a  Puritan  word 
much  ridiculed  by  the  Royalists ;  it 
gave  refinement,  distinction,  select- 
ness,  elevation  to  his  picture  of  the 
world.  But  it  would  be  uncritical  to 
deny  that  it  also  gave  a  certain  nar- 
rowness and  rigidity  to  his  view  of 
human  life. 

[28] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

It  is  curious  how  Milton's  early 
poems  have  changed  places  in  favor 
with  Paradise  Lost.  They  were  neg- 
lected for  over  a  century.  Joseph 
Warton  testifies  in  1756  that  they 
had  only  "very  lately  met  with  a 
suitable  regard" ;  had  lain  "in  a  sort 
of  obscurity,  the  private  enjoyment 
of  a  few  curious  readers. ' '  And  Dr. 
Johnson  exclaims :  "Surely  no  man 
could  have  fancied  that  he  read 
Lyddas  with  pleasure,  had  he  not 
known  its  author."  There  can  be 
little  doubt  that  now-a-days  Milton's 
juvenilia  are  more  read  than  Paradise 
Lost,  and  by  many — perhaps  by  a 
majority  of  readers — rated  higher. 
In  this  opinion  I  do  not  share.  Para- 
dise  Lost  seems  to  me  not  only 
greater  work,  more  important,  than 
the  minor  pieces,  but  better  poetry, 
richer  and  perfecter.  Yet  one  quality 
these  early  poems  have  which  Para- 
dise Lost  has  not— charm.  Milton's 
[29] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

epic  astonishes,  moves,  delights,  but 
it  does  not  fascinate.  The  youthful 
Milton  was  sensitive  to  many  attrac- 
tions which  he  afterwards  came  to 
look  upon  with  stern  disapproval. 
He  went  to  the  theatre  and  praised 
the  comedies  of  Shakspere  and  Jon- 
son;  he  loved  the  romances  of 
chivalry  and  fairy  tales;  he  had  no 
objection  to  dancing,  ale  drinking, 
the  music  of  the  fiddle  and  rural 
sports;  he  writes  to  Diodati  of  the 
pretty  girls  on  the  London  streets ; 
he  celebrates  the  Catholic  and  Gothic 
elegancies  of  English  church  archi- 
tecture and  ritual,  the  cloister's  pale, 
the  organ  music  and  full  voiced  choir, 
the  high  embowed  roof,  and  the 
storied  windows  which  his  military 
friends  were  soon  to  smash  at  Ely, 
Salisbury,  Canterbury,  Lichfield,  as 
popish  idolatries.  But  in  Iconoclastes 
we  find  him  sneering  at  the  king  for 
keeping  a  copy  of  Shakspere  in  his 

[30] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

closet.  In  his  treatise  Of  Reforma- 
tion he  denounces  the  prelates  for 
"embezzling  the  treasury  of  the 
church  on  painted  and  gilded  walls  of 
temples,  wherein  God  hath  testified 
to  have  no  delight. ' '  Evidently  the 
Anglican  service  was  one  of  those 
"gay  religions,  rich  with  pomp  and 
gold"  to  which  he  alludes  in  Para- 
dise Lost.  A  chorus  commends 
Samson  the  Nazarene  for  drinking 
nothing  but  water.  Modern  trage- 
dies are  condemned  for  "mixing 
comic  stuff  with  tragic  sadness  and 
gravity,  or  introducing  trivial  and 
vulgar  persons" — as  Shakspere  does. 
In  Paradise  Lost  the  poet  speaks 
with  contempt  of  the  romances 
whose  "chief  mastery"  it  was 

" — to  dissect, 

With  long  and  tedious  havoc,  fabled  knights 
In  battles  feigned." 

And  in  Paradise  Regained  he  even 
disparages  his  beloved  classics,  pre- 

[31] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

ferring  the  psalms  of  David,  the 
Hebrew  prophecies  and  the  Mosaic 
law,  to  the  poets,  philosophers  and 
orators  of  Athens. 

The  Puritans  were  Old  Testa- 
ment men.  Their  God  was  the 
Hebrew  Jehovah,  their  imaginations 
were  filled  with  the  wars  of  Israel 
and  the  militant  theocracy  of  the 
Jews.  In  Milton's  somewhat  patron- 
izing attitude  toward  women,  there 
is  something  Mosaic — something  al- 
most Oriental.  He  always  remained 
susceptible  to  beauty  in  women,  but 
he  treated  it  as  a  weakness,  a  temp- 
tation. The  bitterness  of  his  own 
marriage  experience  mingles  with 
his  words.  I  need  not  cite  the  well- 
known  passages  about  Dalilah  and 
Eve,  where  he  who  reads  between 
the  lines  can  always  detect  the  figure 
of  Mary  Powell.  There  is  no  gallan- 
try in  Milton,  but  a  deal  of  common 
sense.  The  love  of  the  court  poets, 

[32] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

cavaliers  and  sonneteers,  their  hy- 
perboles of  passion,  their  abasement 
before  their  ladies  he  doubtless 
scorned  as  the  fopperies  of  chivalry, 
fantastic  and  unnatural  .exaggera- 
tions, the  insincerities  of  'Vulgar 
amourists,"  the  fume  of 

— court  amour, 

Mixt  dance,  or  wanton  mask,  or  midnight  ball, 
Or  serenate  which  the  starved  lover  sings 
To  his  proud  fair,  best  quitted  with  disdain." 

To  the  Puritan,  woman  was  at 
best  the  helpmate  and  handmaid  of 
man.  Too  often  she  was  a  snare,  or 
a  household  foe,  '  'a  cleaving  mischief 
far  within  defensive  arms."  L* Al- 
legro and  //  Penseroso  are  the  only 
poems  of  Milton  in  which  he  surren- 
ders himself  spontaneously  to  the 
joy  of  living,  to  "unreproved  pleas- 
ures free,"  with  no  arriere  pensee, 
or  intrusion  of  the  conscience.  Even 
in  those  pleasant  Horatian  lines  to 
Lawrence,  inviting  him  to  spend  a 

[33] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

winter  day  by  the  fire,  drink  wine 
and  hear  music,  he  ends  with  a  fine 
Puritan  touch : 

He  who  of  these  delights  can  judge,  yet 

spare 
To  interpose  them  oft,  is  truly  wise." 

"Dost  thou  think,  because  thou 
art  virtuous,  there  shall  be  no  more 
cakes  and  ale  ?"  inquires  Sir  Toby  of 
Shakspere's  only  Puritan. 

"Yes,"  adds  the  clown,  "and 
ginger  shall  be  hot  in  the  mouth, 
too."  And  "wives  may  be  merry 
and  yet  honest,"  asserts  Mistress 
Page. 

It  is  not  without  astonishment 
that  one  finds  Emerson  writing :  "To 
this  antique  heroism  Milton  added 
the  genius  of  the  Christian  sanctity 
*  #  *  laying  its  chief  stress  on  hu- 
mility." Milton  had  a  zeal  for 
righteousness,  a  noble  purity  and 
noble  pride.  But  if  you  look  for 

[34] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

saintly  humility,  for  the  spirit  of  the 
meek  and  lowly  Jesus,  the  spirit  of 
charity  and  forgiveness,  look  for 
them  in  the  Anglican  Herbert,  not 
in  the  Puritan  Milton.  Humility 
was  no  fruit  of  the  system  which 
Calvin  begot  and  which  begot  John 
Knox.  The  Puritans?  were  great  in- 
vokers  of  the  sword  of  the  Lord  and 
of  Gideon — the  sword  of  Gideon  and 
the  dagger  of  Ehud.  There  went  a 
sword  out  of  Milton's  mouth  against 
the  enemies  of  Israel,  a  sword  of 
threatenings,  the  wrath  of  God  upon 
the  ungodly.  The  temper  of  his 
controversial  writings  is  little  short 
of  ferocious.  There  was  not  much  in 
him  of  that  "sweet  reasonableness" 
which  Matthew  Arnold  thought  the 
distinctive  mark  of  Christian  ethics. 
He  was  devout,  but  not  with  the 
Christian  devoutness.  I  would  not 
call  him  a  Christian  at  all,  except, 
of  course,  in  his  formal  adherence  to 

[35] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

the  creed  of  Christianity.  Very  sig- 
nificant is  the  inferiority  of  Paradise 
Regained  to  Paradise  Lost.  And  in 
Paradise  Lost  itself,  how  weak  and 
faint  is  the  character  of  the  Savior ! 
You  feel  that  he  is  superfluous,  that 
the  poet  did  not  need  him.  He  is 
simply  the  second  person  of  the 
Trinity,  the  executive  arm  of  the 
Godhead ;  and  Milton  is  at  pains  to 
invent  things  for  him  to  do — to  drive 
the  rebellious  angels  out  of  heaven, 
to  preside  over  the  six  days'  work  of 
creation,  etc.  I  believe  it  was 
Thomas  Davidson  who  said  that  in 
Paradise  Lost  "Christ  is  God's  good 
boy." 

We  are  therefore  not  unprepared 
to  discover,  from  Milton's  Treatise 
of  Christian  Doctrine,  that  he  had 
laid  aside  the  dogma  of  vicarious 
sacrifice  and  was,  in  his  last  years,  a 
Unitarian.  It  was  this  Latin  trea- 
tise, translated  and  published  in  1824, 
[36] 


MILTON'S  TERCENTENARY 

which  called  out  Macaulay's  essay, 
so  urbanely  demolished  by  Matthew 
Arnold,  and  which  was  triumphant- 
ly reviewed  by  Dr.  Channing  in  the 
North  American.  It  was  lucky  for 
Dr.  Channing,  by  the  way,  that  he 
lived  in  the  nineteenth  century  and 
not  in  the  seventeenth.  Two  So- 
cinians,  Leggatt  and  Wightman, 
were  burned  at  the  stake  as  late  as 
James  the  First's  reign,  one  at  Lich- 
field  and  the  other  at  Smithfield. 

Milton,  then,  does  not  belong 
with  those  broadly  human,  all  toler- 
ant, impartial  artists,  who  reflect, 
with  equal  sympathy  and  infinite 
curiosity,  every  phase  of  life :  with 
Shakspere  and  Goethe  or,  on  a 
lower  level,  with  Chaucer  and  Mon- 
taigne ;  but  with  the  intense,  austere 
and  lofty  souls  whose  narrowness  is 
likewise  their  strength.  His  place  is 
beside  Dante,  the  Catholic  Puritan. 

[37] 


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